We Are the Weather

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  A Second Home

  It’s entirely possible that we will have our necessary second Earth one day. People like Stephen Hawking have argued that we need to start colonizing space within one hundred years to keep the species alive, and people like Elon Musk are actively working toward making it a reality. We may figure out how to launch one hundred thousand people at a time (the alignment of the planets allows for favorable departures only once every two years—according to Musk, the Mars colonial fleet would launch en masse, “kind of like Battlestar Galactica”), devise a way to manufacture rocket fuel on Mars, and solve the problem of building infrastructure necessary to sustain a colony, not to mention make a home in a place with temperatures of minus eighty degrees Fahrenheit (talk about a climate problem) and deadly radiation. If we can’t clean up our water and air, we can always manage on a planet without any.

  A mere sixty-six years separate the Wright brothers’ first flight and Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon—a span shorter than it took Noah to build the ark, and shorter than my parents’ lives. If someone in the time of the Wright brothers had suggested that in fewer than seven decades there would be a human on the moon—forget about the hundreds of millions of earthlings watching it on television sets in homes—the notion would likely have been met with something stronger than skepticism. Humanity has a tendency to underestimate its own power to create and destroy.

  But maybe the question isn’t can we do it (let’s assume we can), or even should we (let’s assume it could be accomplished, as Musk has predicted, with relatively little investment and relatively little time), but rather what, beyond watching and hoping, should we do in the meantime. To what extent does this deus ex machina—or the dozens of other engineering strategies that have been proposed, from blocking sunlight with the mass injection of sulfate aerosols, to post-facto carbon removal, to the “engineered weathering” of the oceans—deserve our attention?

  And what portion of that attention should conclude in fear of Frankenstein solutions that turn against their creators? Responding to techno-interventions in the environment, the usually restrained National Academy of Sciences declared, “There is significant potential for unanticipated, unmanageable, and regrettable consequences in multiple human dimensions from [attempts to modify the climate], including political, social, legal, economic, and ethical dimensions.” How many of our eggs should we put in the basket of miracle fixes?

  And how many in the basket of legislated change? Can’t we—they—just tax fossil fuels in proportion to the amount of carbon released? Institute an ambitious cap-and-trade program? Incentivize international cooperation via tariffs? Regulate global emissions in a way that not even a recalcitrant leader can exempt a country from?

  We can try. We have to try. When it comes to working against the destruction of our home, the answer is never either/or—it’s always both/and. We can no longer afford to pick and choose which planetary illnesses we attempt to remedy, or which remedies we attempt. We must strive to end the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, and invest in renewable energy, and recycle, and employ renewable materials, and phase out hydrofluorocarbons in refrigerants, and plant trees, and protect trees, and fly less, and drive less, and advocate for a carbon tax, and change our farming practices, and reduce food waste, and reduce our consumption of animal products. And so much more.

  But technological and economic solutions are good at fixing technological and economic problems. While the planetary crisis will require invention and legislation, it is a far broader kind of problem—an environmental problem—that involves social challenges like overpopulation, the disempowerment of women, income inequality, and consumption habits. It reaches into not only our future but our past.

  According to Project Drawdown, four of the most effective strategies for mitigating global warming are reducing food waste, educating girls, providing family planning and reproductive healthcare, and collectively shifting to a plant-rich diet. The benefits of these advancements extend far beyond the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and their primary cost is our collective effort. But there is no getting around that cost.

  Civilian efforts during World War II were indispensable for defeating the enemies abroad, but they also triggered social progress at home. Despite the injustice that many American minorities suffered during the war—segregated armies, the abuse of Japanese Americans—it was also a period of social progress that would shape American culture. In 1941, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, which outlawed racial discrimination in national defense industries and in government. Membership in the NAACP increased from eighteen thousand to almost five hundred thousand during the war. In the South, the percentage of African Americans who registered to vote jumped from 2 to 12 percent, and many referred to the war as a “Double V”—a victory abroad and a victory over segregation at home. The exodus of men for the battlefront cleared a space for nearly seven million women to join the industrial workforce. Jobs opened for Mexican Americans as well; between 1941 and 1944, the number working in Los Angeles shipyards increased from zero to seventeen thousand. These newfound opportunities for women and minorities exposed structural prejudice, cultivated professional skills, and galvanized civil rights movements to come.

  Saving ourselves will require collective action, and acting collectively will change us—especially if we change not because we are inspired to, not because we “see the light,” but rather because, sensing an approaching dark, we compel ourselves to act on knowledge that we can’t believe. When a couple suffers a betrayal—an affair, for example—and is deciding whether to stay together, the famed therapist Esther Perel encourages the partners to think of their marriage in these terms: “Your first marriage is over. Would you like to create a second one together?”

  Perhaps we don’t need to abandon home to save ourselves: our second Earth could be a transformed version of the one we currently inhabit. Either way, we are going to have to live on a new planet—one that we reach by leaving, or one that we reach by staying. Those two forms of saving ourselves would say very different things about us.

  What kind of future would you predict for a civilization that abandons its home? We would be revealed by that decision, and we would be changed by it. People who think of home as dispensable will be able to think of anything as dispensable, and will become a dispensable people.

  What kind of future would you predict for a civilization that acts collectively to save its home? We would be revealed by that decision, and we would be changed by it. By making the necessary leap—which is not a leap of faith but of action—we would do more than save our planet. We would make ourselves worthy of salvation.

  Glass

  The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990. Its optics are so powerful and precise that if it were aimed at Earth—and able to overcome the haziness of the atmosphere and blurring speed of the telescope’s orbit—it could read this page over your shoulder. Turned away from Earth, Hubble can see nearly to the beginning of time.

  Hubble was originally funded in the 1970s but took twenty years to design, build, and launch. The modern equivalent of a cathedral, it is a physical expression of humankind’s collective achievements and ambitions. Among its many accomplishments is determining the size and age of the universe, detecting the first organic molecule outside our solar system, revealing that nearly all galaxies contain supermassive black holes, understanding how planets are born, and witnessing a distant supernova that suggests the universe only recently began speeding up.

  It was almost all for naught. When the first images came through, it was obvious that there was a serious problem with the optics. The mirror—arguably the most precisely carved mirror ever made—was ground too shallow by about one-fiftieth the width of a human hair. Instead of bringing 70 percent of a star’s light into the focal point, Hubble could manage only about 10 percent. The images were a disappointment, and the project became NASA’s worst-ever embarrassment—in Naked Gun 2½, a photo of Hubble is h
ung alongside those of the Hindenburg and Michael Dukakis.

  This was not an easy problem to solve. The mirror couldn’t be re-polished in space. Neither could a replacement mirror be installed in orbit. And it would be far too expensive to bring Hubble back to Earth for repairs. The saving grace, as it turned out, was the precision of the error—an optical component with the same degree of error in the other direction could correct the focus. In 1300, the effort to create glasses led to the invention of the mirror; seven centuries later, the most sophisticated mirror ever made needed a pair of glasses. Sometimes, even the most vast and complex problems can be solved with a simple correction, a balancing. We don’t need to reinvent food but to un-invent it. The future of farming and eating needs to resemble the past.

  * * *

  Vincenzo Peruggia had been hired by the Louvre to construct protective glass cases for a number of paintings. On the evening of August 20, 1911, he and two accomplices hid inside a closet used for storing student art supplies. When they emerged the next morning, Peruggia went straight to the Mona Lisa, removed it from the wall, and carried it out the museum’s main entrance.

  At the time, the Mona Lisa wasn’t widely known outside the art world; it was not the most famous work in its gallery, much less the museum. It took twenty-four hours before the painting’s absence was even noticed. But once it drew the attention of the burgeoning print media, the theft became international intrigue, and the Mona Lisa, now referred to as a masterpiece, became the most famous painting in the world. When the Louvre reopened, after a week of being closed for investigation, queues formed outside for the first time in the museum’s history. In the two years between the painting’s theft and return, more people came to see the bare wall on which it had hung—“the mark of shame”—than had ever come to see the painting.

  Franz Kafka paid the empty wall a visit within a month of the painting’s disappearance, the absence now among his collection of “invisible curiosities”—sights, events, people, and works of art that he had missed seeing. The following year, perhaps inspired by the experience, Kafka wrote his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis, in which a man awakes one morning as an insect, his perspective radically altered, and his body—his first home—no longer hospitable.

  The fame of the painting has only increased with time—or perhaps it’s more correct to say that the fame of the fame of the painting has increased. People want to see the Mona Lisa because other people want to see the Mona Lisa. The Louvre estimates that 80 percent of those who visit the museum come to see only that one work. It now resides behind 1.52-inch-thick bulletproof glass. While the purpose of the glass is to protect the world’s most valuable painting, the effect is to enhance our sense of its value and vulnerability. When we look at the Mona Lisa, the bulletproof glass also serves as a corrective lens.

  * * *

  I owned a pair of glasses for two full years before I wore them regularly. On one of my kindergarten field trips, the teacher told all the kids to move to one side of the bus. There was something to see out the windows. The bus leaned under the shifted weight, and the other kids gasped dramatically.

  “Do you see it?” my teacher asked over my shoulder.

  “See what?”

  “If you were wearing your glasses, you would see it.”

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be seeing.”

  “If you wore your glasses, you would.”

  At the time, I suspected that everyone was in on a trick, that the students went to the side when signaled, pointed and gasped at nothing—all to teach me a lesson.

  The next day, my teacher said I looked handsome in the aviator glasses my mother had picked out for me, but I knew the truth. I asked her what they’d been looking at on the bus.

  “A daytime moon,” she said.

  “But I was looking at a window washer,” I said. “He was really small.”

  “We were looking at the moon.”

  “Of course I could have seen that.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  I couldn’t see it because I wasn’t looking for it. We can wear glasses to correct our vision on Earth, and we can go to space to correct our vision of Earth. But no glasses or interstellar journey can aim us in the right direction. We direct our gazes at the things we want to see, the things we care about. Our perception is sharpest when our care is heightened, and living things care most when they are afraid. People stared at the Mona Lisa after it was stolen. I stared at the window washer because I had a fear of heights.

  My hearing is sharpest when listening for a sleeping child. My palate is most refined when I have been asked to determine if a food has gone bad. My vision is sharpest when I’m in fight-or-flight mode. People often remember near-death experiences as having happened in slow motion, with all their senses heightened. Perhaps this is just another version of hysterical strength.

  The problem is, our relationship to the planet is a near-death experience that doesn’t feel like one. If we could believe that our planet was in danger, we could see it for what it is. It might be true that if a billion people could experience the overview effect, it would revolutionize how earthlings think of and treat Earth. But the only scenario in which that is likely to happen is when we are on our way to a new home. Imagine that: the entire species shifting to see out the windows of one side of the spacecraft, looking through a thick pane of protective glass, and realizing that our home was a masterpiece.

  Jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge results in death 98 percent of the time. More than sixteen thousand have jumped. Among the few survivors, all who have shared their experiences describe changing their minds as soon as they let go. Perhaps our species would experience something similar. Kevin Hines was eighteen when he leaped. If we were to lose our planet, perhaps each of us would think, as Hines did, watching the bridge recede as he fell, “What have I done?”

  First Home

  “The human race has existed as a separate species for about 2 million years. Civilization came about 10,000 years ago, and the rate of development has been steadily increasing. If humanity is to continue for another million years, it relies on boldly going where no one has gone before … We will need to take the practical means of establishing a whole new ecosystem that will survive in an environment that we know very little about and we will need to consider transporting several thousands of people, animals, plants, fungi, bacteria and insects.”

  So said Stephen Hawking.

  If your house were in need of repairs, even extensive ones, would it be bold to abandon it for a new house? What if the new house were sure to be vastly less hospitable and far from everything you’ve known?

  Instead of traveling beyond the horizon, we could venture into our own consciences and colonize still-uninhabited parts of our internal landscapes. Instead of leaping to the distant fantasy of transporting animals on spaceships to other planets, we could start, right now, raising far fewer of them on the extraordinary planet we already have.

  When Americans turned off their lights during WWII, they weren’t protecting their houses—the blackouts had little utilitarian value—they were protecting their homes. They were demonstrating solidarity, and therefore protecting their families and cultures, their safety and freedom.

  In a 2016 public service announcement for a Swedish nonprofit, Hawking said, “At the moment, humanity faces a major challenge, and millions of lives are in danger.” He then proceeded to speak about obesity and why humankind needs to eat less and get more physical activity. “It’s not rocket science.”

  Millions of lives might be in danger because of eating too much food, but every human life is in danger because of eating too many animal products. It’s not rocket science in the colloquial sense, and the answer is not literally rocket science. If we don’t demonstrate solidarity through small collective sacrifices, we will not win the war, and if we do not win the war, we will lose the childhood home of every human who has ever lived.

  Final Home

  I
am sitting at my grandmother’s bedside. My older brother urged me to come down this weekend. I knew what he meant. For the same reason that my brother didn’t say, “She’s about to die,” I have had a hard time saying what I mean to my grandmother. Even touching her is difficult. I am capable of “I love you,” but not “I am going to miss you.” I am capable of kissing her hello and goodbye, but not taking her hand while with her.

  Looking at my grandmother from this distance, I feel something like the overview effect: home is suddenly vulnerable, beautiful, singular. And I suddenly see all of her at once—in the context of my life, my family, history. Framed by a seemingly infinite black emptiness, my grandmother is in need of, and deserving of, protection.

  I punish myself by remembering all the times I took her for granted, or worse. I made faces to my brother while on compulsory phone calls with her. I begged not to have to sleep over at her house, and while there, I watched hours of reruns and spoke to her hardly at all. I turned my face away from her kisses.

  Having my own children now, I know that I was doing what children do. It is not a child’s responsibility to take care of an elder (or a home, or a planet); it is an adult’s. And that is what my parents have done, bringing her here, making their home her home. They installed a stair lift so she could move between floors, hired occasional and then full-time help, and have never once mentioned how much less privacy they have, or how many more emotional, logistical, and financial responsibilities. Their care for her—which has required many kinds of sacrifice—has been a revelation for me. I don’t believe it is a coincidence that this book began to germinate when she moved in with them.